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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Quick question for those of you who are/were in grad school or routinely do research... What do you use (if anything) to organize your citation info? Opinions on software, hardware, filing cabinets etc. welcome!

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I I always use refworks, it has most of the main styles like mla, Chicago, and apa, and it'll do the formatting for you. I'm an undergrad but my school has a subscription to their service. If your school doesn't, I think you can get a 30 day free trial. Also what's nice about refworks and other online sites is that you can directly import your sources from jstor, ebsco, etc. Other than that I like to print out all of my articles and put them in a binder.

Hope that helps, and good luck! Finals are next week for me, yuck. But I always find I can study better if my nails look good.

I used Style Ease for my thesis. In the end it didn't matter too much because I found it was just easier to pay a person to format it and do it exactly in the way the University would accept it. I still liked using Style Ease because it did a lot of piddly work for me like formatting my references and stuff as I put them in. Good luck you are welcome to ask more at dragonrhia(at)gmail(dot)com

I have been formatting by hand for YEARS. I found out about EndNote at the end of undergrad from one of my profs but figured that I wouldn't really use it until I decided if I wanted to do a PhD. (I also felt too stupid to bother trying to figure it out..) I have to admit that looking back, that was a silly decision on my part. :P

I opened up EndNote today and so far... I am in love.

I know a couple of people who use RefWorks but most of the people I know don't use anything at all and I'm not sure why. This would have made my life about 1000x easier over the past few years.

Some of my profs don't use anything either and I'm shocked that they're able to churn out as much research as they do. I'm in the process of putting together my bibliographic/reading lists for my comprehensive exams in a few months and I know if I don't find some way to keep everything straight my comps are going to be a huge chaotic mess.

@Shmemi: Thanks for your input. You're smart to use refworks even in undergrad. If I could do one thing over... ! Good luck with your finals. I'm sure you'll be awesome! (I'm the opposite of you. I haven't done my nails in about a month and a half...LOL)

@Lacquer Ware... I wonder where I'd find someone to hire to do that.. LOL I think profs would pay me. haha Will look at StyleEase. Thanks!

@daydream... don't be like me! It makes life so much harder!

@LaquerMuse ... can you recommend any tutorial sites or did you just use the main site?

I'm only in undergrad but I use EndNote as well. It seems to be what everyone uses here, but it might be because the library has the license to cover all staff and students. It's fairly easy to use - I suppose some university libraries may have set up tutorial websites for that (e.g. http://libguides.library.usyd.edu.au/endnote).

I'm undergrad but use the refernces tab in Word as I write a draft or paper and EndNote. I like the Son Of Citation Machine website too & just because I am anal about research papers I usually keep an ongoing annotated bibliography for each paper using index cards. I always have a fear that I'll crash the computer just as I am finishing up my citations & won't be able to retrive lost files so the index cards are my back up plan. LOL

Good luck w/ the rest of your semester. I have one more final & one essay left tomorrow & I am done til June :)

I have used EndNote in the past and ISI Web of Knowledge has their own version that is free but you can only use it with an internet connection. I have lately been doing it manually in word cause I find myself using so many different computers and some don't have EndNote, stinkin' university, can't give me my own computer!